As Though She Were Sleeping (2 page)

Milia decided to get out of bed and fetch a glass of water. She saw her own white nakedness reflected in the twin mirrors of her eyes. She closed her eyes again and made up her mind to ask the man who slept on this bed beside her, his back turned, to come back inside the car because she was worried for his safety. She closed her eyes and saw herself slipping: she was drifting into the white vapor outside. She forgot her thirst at the sight of a woman naked and prone, before her a windshield fogged over with human breath and a man walking in front of the car carrying the trembling flame of a candle as if he would pierce the solid fog in his black wedding suit and his olive-green overcoat.

Silence; a naked woman; a vehicle creeping almost imperceptibly through the dreary fog; a driver hunched close over the steering wheel trying to see the road through a windshield splotched with white; and a man walking before the car draped in white fog and clutching a white candle.

The candle went out or at least it looked that way to her. The man came to a stop, standing in the middle of the road, opening his overcoat as if trying to shelter the candle inside so that he might ignite its flame again. He
crooked his back and leaned into the wind; the flaps of his coat flew upward, but the man himself remained motionless, there, outside on the road. The driver’s breathing accelerated, coming faster and louder. Every so often he opened the car window, sticking his head out and shouting into the wind, but she could not make out any of his words.

Milia was cold. A sharp pain lanced her belly. She tried to cover herself, wrapping her body as fully as she could in the brown overcoat and pressing her crossed arms to her chest. She could hear her teeth chattering as she enfolded herself in the coat and the darkness. The candle was useless, she thought. She made up her mind to get out of the car. If the headlights weren’t able to slice through the fog, she wanted to say to that man, what could a candle possibly do? She would tell him to come back to the car, except she did not dare to leave the car, naked and cold as she was.

Who had put the bed in the car? Why was she naked? After all, when getting ready for bed she always put on her long blue nightgown that covered her body and legs all the way to her ankles. She did not even undo her bra. What had made her resolve never to remove it was the sight, long ago, of her grandmother’s elongated, pendulous breasts. She thought of that image of Grandmama as an alarming warning that her own adult breasts might well droop all the way to her belly, and so she had decided to brace them at all times, even when sleeping. But now it appeared she had on neither a nightgown nor a bra. The driver’s breathing had grown even louder as he pressed his chest heavily against the steering wheel, his eyes plastered to the windshield. Milia was afraid. The man whom she glimpsed through the fog was moving farther away, almost as though he were flying. His overcoat ballooned with the wind and he looked a lone figure beating his wings against the wind high above the precipitous wadi.

In the dream Milia saw herself a pale-white figure. She did not fully understand where this pallor had come from. The body she inhabited during
the day was not hers but rather a reflection from other people’s eyes. Her mother had desired a light-skinned daughter with a full figure and so Milia’s body had grown lighter in color as it filled out, purely for her mother’s sake. At night, though, her body was entirely her own. She was seven years old; her skin was brown and her body lean. Her eyes were big and wide and took over the whole of her face; her hair was black and curly and her nose so small and slender it seemed barely sketched in beneath the long thin sweep of eyebrow. She wore shorts and ran barefoot. Her eyes borrowed a pair of green irises to replace the light brown ones that people saw by day. Those irises floated in a white expanse shot through with a blue so evanescent it was barely perceptible to the eye.

Little Milia is in love with the nighttime through whose narrow lanes she scampers. She lies down on her bed and opens her eyes so that the night comes drawn in dark pencil around her eyelids. When the darkness becomes total she closes her eyes and walks into her dreams. When morning comes she has not swept those dreams from her eyes. She leaves them there, circles sketched in invisible ink so that she can bring them back whenever she wishes. She closes her eyes: this is all she has to do for the voices to dwindle to nothing and the lights to blot out. And then she can go to that place where she sees everything and discovers all the secrets that are there to find.

Milia did not let on to anyone that she was keeping her dreams hidden away, concealed in a deep reservoir beneath the darkness. In the murky blackness she would dig, carving a place to lay down her dreams. She would go to her hollowed-out dreampit whenever she wanted those dreams. There she could extract the dreams she sought and dream them all over again.

This dream, though, comes from no place: in the dreampit this Milia does not exist. Milia of the night is not Milia of the day. Where do the images of daylight come from, then? How are they made? Is it because she has gotten married? Is this what marriage is?

Milia is finding it hard to swallow or to breathe, and she shivers incessantly from the cold. The nighttime is a deep well and she crouches at the very bottom. The driver moans as if with pain and his breathing grows louder and heavier, seeming almost to cuff her lightly on the neck. She tries to ask the driver – whose bald head is all she can see – what the matter with him is, but her voice has dissolved. She tries to raise her head from the pillow but her head has grown too heavy. Suddenly the driver leaves the car. He has disappeared and Mansour has disappeared and the naked woman is alone in bed. The fog swallows her and the snow falls all around. She tries to pick up her left foot, stiff with the cold, but cannot. She has the sensation of falling out of bed. A terrible pain hits her between the thighs, a knife stabs her, and there’s blood.

She screams. She means to scream that the driver is violating her. But her voice is gone and her mouth has filled up with cotton.

Alone in the gloom and the cold, Milia decided to open her eyes and pull herself from this particular dream. She saw a white face framed by a pair of white wings. She put her right hand out to it and feathers clung to her fingertips. She cried out, asking the face to save her, but the face did not hear her voice. What she meant to say, what she wanted to say, was that she yearned to go home. That she no longer wanted marriage. But in the end she did not say it. The winged face circled above the car, above the wadi, above the two men. The face floated away, feather-wings dropping from it like the snowflakes falling in front of the pale glow from the car’s headlights.

She did not want to spend their honeymoon in Shtoura, Milia said. Snow was falling over the high plains of Dahr el-Baydar and it was very cold. There was no need for the Hotel Massabki, she said, no need for any honey right now. We can stay in Beirut for a couple of days with my family, she said, and then we can go directly to Nazareth.

It was December, after all, said her mother. Kanun, a month when no one
could imagine honeymooning
there
. Think again, she said. Change your plans. Come summertime, have all the honey you want.

Sister Milana said it would be better if they did not go to Shtoura in this cold weather; but there was no real danger in going, she supposed. It’s a foolish little adventure, she huffed. Much better to postpone it.

But Mansour insisted.
Ma bsir!
he exclaimed. This could not be, he ruled; the journey was not to be postponed. He wanted the honeymoon in Shtoura. Marriage and the honey of it could truly happen only at the Hotel Massabki.

Musa knitted his eyebrows but he told his sister that it was not an issue, really. There was no argument. The man wants Shtoura, so be it, he said. Go with him.

Still wearing her long white bridal gown, Milia climbed into the American-make car and settled herself beside Mansour on the backseat. The shrill joyful
yuuyuuyuus
of the women wishing her well deafened her to her mother’s voice. Leaning into the car’s open window, her mother was murmuring words of goodbye and whispering women’s advice. Musa stepped up to the car and tossed two coats at them: his dark olive-green overcoat and his mother’s brown coat. He looked long into Milia’s eyes before turning to Mansour.

Congratulations, bridegroom, he said, and walked away.

The car moved through a silence broken only by the fierce onslaught of a Beirut rainstorm, the water coming down in ropes. Milia shut her eyes but reopened them as she felt Mansour’s lips kissing her neck. She pushed his mouth away – Later, not now! – and fell back into her sleepy reverie. The car slowed down around the winding mountain roads that would take them to Shtoura. She slept with her head leaning against the car door, opening her eyes only at the sound of Mansour’s voice ordering the driver to go on. The car had halted, swathed in a white fog that completely enveloped
everything around them. She closed her eyes but Mansour’s voice was so loud that they opened again.

He could not go any farther on this road because he could not see it, the driver said. Mansour opened the car door and jumped out into the road. He walked two steps forward until he was directly in front of the car. He twisted around and beckoned to the driver to follow him. He walked a few steps, looking as though he were slipping across ice. When the car did not budge he retraced his steps, pulled Musa’s olive-green coat from the backseat and put it on, and told the driver he would walk ahead. All the driver and the car had to do was to follow.

He’s gone, Milia said. Gone, for she could not see him at all right then, nor for several seconds after. The cold air struck her face and the snowflakes falling over the interminable fog were coming thickly, spreading across the landscape. Milia lost her husband. Then she saw him through the front windshield, the likeness of a wraith scaling the frosty seething air.

Excuse me, bride, said the driver. But the bridegroom is mad, what can I do?

Milia’s body was shivering with the cold and her fear and she did not answer.

Tell me, what am I to do? persisted the driver.

Follow him, said Milia, her voice choked and low.

Khuta!
So the bride’s a lunatic, too!
Ya
Allah what have I gotten myself into! grumbled the driver. He pressed his foot on the gas and the car began to skate across the ice.

She saw Mansour walking forward, carrying a snuffed-out candle in his right hand. Bent close behind the front windshield the driver drove haltingly behind the olive-green coat that ballooned out as the turbulent outside air found its way underneath.

The driver jerked his head to the rear and Milia could see the black centers
of his eyes. They looked like coals, but cold ones, the glow burnt out. His eyes stung her and his raspy voice frightened her. She asked him to keep his eyes on the road and to keep a strong hold on the steering wheel because the car was skidding. But he kept his gaze on her, muttering incoherently as the car continued its slow slide.

Shu amm bit’uul!
she shouted. What are you saying, there?

Does anyone go honeymooning in Shtoura at this time of year? Your husband has no brains! groused the driver, his voice reaching her slowly in wisps of sound. Milia stared into the darkness before her and discovered that what she had believed to be eyes were two holes notched into the driver’s bald pate, hollows coated with a stinking oily substance. The dark pink tinge that Milia’s discomfiture had brought to her cheeks receded. Once again the extreme cold assaulted her bones and her teeth chattered. She pressed her lips together and closed her eyes.

Milia had not understood what the driver said, but she would recall the interminable sound of his mutterings and his grinding oaths. He opened the car door time after time in order to see outside, and each time she could hear the falling snow like a whispering voice as the cold wind from outside hit her face – a bride in her finery, huddled apprehensively in a corner of the backseat.

Milia decided to come out of this dream and speak to the man whom another dream had chosen as her husband. She opened her eyes and rubbed her cheeks with her palms – and found herself in the car. Mansour was not beside her. He was out there, walking in the distance, walking away from her amidst the fierce high winds as the driver kept the black pinpoints of his eyes fixed on her face.

God preserve you, don’t you go to sleep now, he snarled.

Milia stared at him, her eyes open to their widest. Seeing those reddened pupils moving in the back of his head, she let out a sudden cry. O Virgin,
Mother of Light, save your servants, O Mother of God! And then immediately she was asleep once again.

Milia did not see what happened nor did she hear the driver exclaim, It’s a miracle! She did not notice how her husband turned aside to stand calmly on the verge of the road waiting for the car to draw even with him. For as Milia’s cry sliced the air, the clouds outside dissolved and clear skies returned; beams of light carved holes in the fog and the snow stopped falling. The driver braked, and as he waited for Mansour to return to the car, he twisted around to stare into the face of the woman who had worked this extraordinary event with her voice. But Milia had her eyes closed, her hovering dreams forming circles around her eyelids. She was a marvel! the driver told her, and her body twitched. She massaged her eyes and smiled, and Mansour opened the car door and got in next to the driver.

What awful cold! exclaimed Mansour.

And me – how’ll I get back to Beirut? asked the driver, as the car careened downward toward the Beqaa Valley.